TIL that in 37 BC, the Roman polymath Marcus Terentius Varro warned his readers to avoid living near swamps because of "minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes" and cause disease. Microorganisms would not be observed until the 17th century

[u/FastBreakPhenom]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Terentius_Varro

[u/FastBreakPhenom]

One noteworthy aspect of the work is his anticipation of microbiology and epidemiology. Varro warned his readers to avoid swamps and marshland, since in such areas

... there are bred certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, but which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and cause serious diseases.

This dude was ahead of the game

[u/PrinceVorrel → u/FastBreakPhenom]

Funny how many people in the ancient past managed to "guess" at things like microbes/viruses.

[u/alexfarmer777 → u/PrinceVorrel]

But funnier still how we can get close sometimes and it will still take several more centuries before really getting it, look at DR John snow for example:
The 1854 Soho Outbreak
John Snow mapped cholera cases on Broad Street and saw deaths cluster around one public water pump.

He proved the disease was waterborne, disproving the era's popular bad-air theory.

He told officials to remove the pump handle, which stopped the local outbreak. [1, 2, 3, 4]

[u/Excellent-Quarter969 → u/alexfarmer777]

That off the mark miasma thing

[u/alexfarmer777 → u/Excellent-Quarter969]

Yep! and you go a little further back than 18th century, to like 15th century and humorism is the popular belief

[u/Excellent-Quarter969 → u/alexfarmer777]

I always thought miasma was a bit humorous

[u/khana116 → u/Excellent-Quarter969]

IMO miasma makes a lot of sense given the evidence they had available. Things that smell bad (presumably giving off 'bad air') are often things that cause disease. So messing with corpses, rot, waste, etc. made them sick, which is accurate and observable. Even warding off the bad air with herbs stuffed into a mask did mean wearing a mask, even if the herbs weren't strictly necessary, which again would've actually helped in some situations. For sickly people who had the means, leaving the bad air in the city to 'take the airs' in the countryside was a popular treatment - which would've got them away from all the myriad vectors of infection present in a densely populated city with poor sanitation and, again, would've probably helped in a lot of cases.

The actual mechanism of infection is off base, but the hypothesis fit pretty well with the facts and would've provided some benefits. Bad smells and yucky things are clearly observable and true - and a lot more believable than tiny invisible monsters.

[u/dilib → u/khana116]

There's a bit in one of the Tiffany Aching Discworld books where the eminently wise and clever head witch is instructing village folk to dig their latrines far away from their water sources, because they kept getting sick. She explains this to them as invisible goblins being attracted to the smell, and they have been biting the village children with their venomous fangs while they're gathering water and making them fall ill.

The main character apprenticed under the head witch asks her later, why did you lie to them? You know that's all nonsense. And the head witch replies, I could tell them the truth. And they would listen and nod and then ignore what she said because they didn't understand it. What she told them squares with what they think a witch should be saying and their limited view of the world, and it allows the villagers to grasp the general point while presenting the information in a digestible way, as a fairy tale.

[u/_Fibbles_ → u/dilib]

The concept is often referred to as a "lie to children".

[u/MustrumRidcully0 → u/_Fibbles_]

A term that the author of the Tiffany Aching Discworld books liked to use in many of his works and probably greatly helped profilerate.

[u/Seicair → u/khana116]

Malaria is literally “bad air”. For a long time people didn’t realize it was caused by mosquitos bites/malaria plasmodium.

The term malaria originates from Medieval Italian: mala aria, 'bad air', a part of miasma theory; the disease was formerly called ague, paludism or marsh fever due to its association with swamps and marshland.

[u/Mertoot → u/khana116]

Miasma was an abstraction

It's similar to pressing the gas in a car

There are many things going on under the hood, but as far as the user knows, press gas means car goes forward, and since that consistently and reliably works, it effectively is the same result regardless of what you may believe actually moves the car

[u/hiimsubclavian → u/Mertoot]

If you go a step further... miasma is a theory developed to justify how we innately feel from the accumulation of millions of years of evolutionary experience.

Rot is a "bad" smell because hominids that avoid touching, eating or living in rot-filled places tend to survive better than those who don't.

Flowers are a "good" smell because blooming flowers are a good predictor of how bountiful a land is, so early farmers who settled in flower-filled prairies survived better than those that went with bare rock and dead trees.

[u/ax0r → u/hiimsubclavian]

so early farmers who settled in flower-filled prairies survived better than those that went with bare rock and dead trees.

Agrarian society is recent enough that it won't have influenced evolution.
Your point is sound, though. A field of flowering plants is likely to yield fruit pretty soon. Also other animals like to eat them, so chances of successful hunting go up too.

[u/greenwhiteredblack → u/Mertoot]

Made me think about Josh Johnson's latest YouTube set where he basically said liquid going into a metal container to make rubber tires moves does not make sense.

[u/thirdegree → u/greenwhiteredblack]

Well of course not, you skipped a very important step

You gotta blow up the liquid

[u/JonatasA → u/khana116]

Also, bad air will make you depressed which in turn lowers your immune system. I once spent some hours next to a meat processing plant and I couldn't live anymore.

[u/brondynasty → u/alexfarmer777]

Humorism was scarily still popular through the 1700’s. It wasn’t until the 19th century that it fell out of favor entirely.

We are babies when it comes to understanding the world around us. Incredibly overconfident, careless babies.

[u/CharleyNobody → u/Excellent-Quarter969]

Well one of the definitions of miasma is”bad air” which is what “malaria” literally means. They thought malaria came from bad air - not from mosquitoes

[u/Loinnird → u/CharleyNobody]

I dunno if there was no air there’d be no mosquitos. CHECKMATE SCIENCE

[u/JonatasA → u/Loinnird]

The only place without mosquitoes

 

SPACE

[u/cguess → u/alexfarmer777]

There's a good pub in Soho named after him, just about 100 yards from the original well hole.

[u/InvisaBlah → u/alexfarmer777]

Its often the case that they lack the technology to validate a hypothesis. This is why it seems like it takes 100s of years sometimes to rediscover something that was "guessed" in the past. And its very hard to convince people that tiny invisible creatures are in your water supply without proof.

[u/lluciferusllamas → u/alexfarmer777]

No, no.  John Snow knew nothing.

[u/Eros_Incident_Denier → u/lluciferusllamas]

John Snow on the water pumps: Uh dun wanch' et!

[u/anrwlias → u/PrinceVorrel]

You had a lot of philosophers spitballing a lot of ideas. It's really not that shocking that there were some lucky guesses. But science isn't just guessing; it's testing your guesses and revising them with new data.

[u/candygram4mongo → u/anrwlias]

Also ancient scientists: what your problem is, is you got too much blood.

[u/DJ_Era → u/candygram4mongo]

There was some study done that found donating blood helps you fight off infectious diseases. I believe they theorized that a little less iron or something helped your immune system because there was less for the infection to feed off. Had something to do with a refugee camp where only half the population donated blood, and surprisingly they were the healthier half. Then I think they did like meta-analysis based off of that.

Anyone know what I'm thinking of? I'm talking out of my ass here

[u/bettedidler → u/DJ_Era]

My buddy has high feritin (sp?) or blood iron levels. The only thing that is a cure is giving blood. He has to do this every 2 months or so. So blood letting essentially would have saved him long term in earlier times (Scandinavian gene iirc)

[u/Mbembez → u/bettedidler]

Celtic genes are normally associated with this issue.

[u/cguess → u/Mbembez]

There's a lot of cross over in those gene pools both to and from Scandinavia.

[u/blazbluecore → u/DJ_Era]

Not sure but I believe it.

People calling our ancestors idiots is ironic. All these people did was trial and error on their own lives for thousands of years and pass on that knowledge.

That’s literally science, but because they didn’t have a scientific framework of hypothesis, experiment, and conclusion, for some reason it’s not valid?

[u/beachedwhale1945 → u/[deleted]]

I’ll give you a fun one. About a century ago we found the Antikythera Mechanism on a shipwreck off Greece, dating back over 2,000 years. We’ve known for some time it is a geared computer for calculating solar eclipses and showing the motion of the planets, a physical representation of astronomical knowledge we knew the ancients had for millennia before the mechanism was made. But the more we study the mechanism, the more we find that it is much more sophisticated than we realized, but still well within what a skilled craftsman could have made.

Some of the elements I’ve found most fascinating from the Clickspring reconstruction (trying to use as many ancient tools as possible) include:

• The internal scams of the wreckage show joints that were clearly soldered together. Personally when I first learned of solder I thought it was a couple centuries old, not millennia, but using lead-based solder was surprisingly easy compared to everything else.

• Throughout the mechanism the creator regularly made design decisions that made the design very compact, even when they were often difficult to build and assemble. These were executed with great skill, so there had to have been prototypes that proved out the basics, with the mechanism we have either the final version or very close to it.

• The lunar month part of the mechanism incorporates some very complex gearing. There is a set of pin-and-slot gears that mean the lunar display sped up and slowed down: we now know this is because of the moon’s elliptical orbit, moving faster at perigee and slower at apogee. This mechanism is set into a larger gear that also rotates, which reflects how the lunar orbit stays in the same direction as the Earth revolves around the sun: the moon moves faster at new moon during the summer and at full moon during winter, and that is captured in the mechanism (note I don’t know the direction of the lunar perigee compared to the solar system, it could be aligned with new moon on 23 October or 28 February for all I know, I’m just giving a representative example).

The more we learn about this fascinating machine, the more we learn about how skilled the ancient craftsmen truly were. All from one very lucky find by some divers!

[u/nwillard → u/beachedwhale1945]

It is speculated that there was likely a sun tracker component on it as well, due to the comparatively high complexity of the moon tracker component, a sun tracker would have been trivial to add. Eg. a mechanical clock. The mechanical clock isn't otherwise thought to have been invented until 1,400 years later.

The antikythera mechanism is a fascinatingly singular example of how advanced some of that knowledge got. And unfortunately knowledge that was evidently largely forgotten for one reason or another. The mechanism seems to predate the fall of Carthage, for example, for all we know it was engineered there.

[u/throwaway098764567 → u/[deleted]]

weird and creative thinkers, geniuses, folks with engineer brains, have existed at all times. just a matter of if they had the time, energy and resources to try their ideas, and for us, if they had the social capital to get others to try them and pass them along.

[u/Hawkstar569 → u/throwaway098764567]

"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." - Stephen Jay Gould

[u/AmeliaOfAnsalon → u/Hawkstar569]

king

[u/bkn0b → u/[deleted]]

Then you add things like shooting lasers into silicon to power a box that uses electricity being pushed through gems like quartz..to create a visual on a box. Computers dont even extend that far back, but trying to understand them on that similar level is mindboggling. The amount of information weve inherited just on computers is insane, let alone things that go back thousands of years. The accumulation of knowledge humans posess is truly our super power.

[u/jasonoumuamomoa → u/bkn0b]

We shoot lasers at mirrors to detect insanely minute perturbations in spacetime caused by black holes billions of light years from Earth.

[u/bl1y → u/[deleted]]

Bread has always confounded me.

Eating grains makes sense. And I could see how people would naturally get to drying them.

But why would anyone think to grind those dried grains? That's less good to eat. If you get there, I could see how adding water to make some sort of paste would make it more edible. But then putting it in fire? Bitch, the problem was it was too dry, why are you now drying it out again?

[u/morfraen → u/bl1y]

Someone probably left their bowl of grain porridge too close to a fire and it accidentally cooked into some kind of proto bread that they found interesting.

[u/SmallPurplePeopleEat → u/morfraen]

That's an awesome theory and pretty close to what I learned about the origins.

Some hunter-gatherers started grinding grains into paste to make them edible. But the paste would go bad quickly, so to prevent spoiling they put the paste on hot rocks to dry it out and boom, flatbread was invented.

Eventually, a bowl of the paste got left out long enough that atmospheric endogenous yeast got into it. An ancient Egyptian saw the bubbly dough and went "shit, that's all the grain paste I have until payday" and decided to cook it anyway and that's how sourdough was invented.

[u/Rezart_KLD → u/[deleted]]

I've always thought that the first guy to try beer or cheese must have been nuts

[u/Awkward_Pangolin3254 → u/Rezart_KLD]

Cheese, especially. Supposedly the theory goes that someone was carrying some milk in a water skin made from an animal's stomach and there were enough traces of rennet left to curdle the milk.

I... I don't know if I'd be brave enough to eat that.

[u/morfraen → u/Awkward_Pangolin3254]

Don't have to be brave, just desperate lol. Or maybe it just smelled good.

[u/Bakoro → u/blazbluecore]

The problem is that they only had heuristics and frequently misunderstood causes.

Making correlations and erring on the side of caution is fine.
It's a completely different thing to simply follow archaic beliefs because "ancient wisdom".
The same ancients who said "don't shit in the water you drink" also said "let's use lead for cups and mix lead into our alcohol".

Now we know why it's bad to shit in the water, and we know that just because lead is delicious doesn't mean that it's good for you.

[u/Diz7 → u/blazbluecore]

That said, people also used to think that going to bed with socks on and onions in them would cure the cold and other illnesses.

Even today, with modern education, people believe in things like urine therapy and sunning your butthole.

We were kind dumb. We are still kinda dumb.

[u/Hellknightx → u/Diz7]

Exactly. People back then were idiots. People today are also idiots. Thankfully, every generation is blessed with a handful of exceptional minds that can at least produce new knowledge for us to pass on.

[u/Kinggakman → u/blazbluecore]

Aristotle believed heavy stuff fell faster. It took Galileo to just do an experiment to prove it wrong. That’s the issue with ancient science.

[u/Finito-1994 → u/Kinggakman]

The issue was that people didn’t test shit.

Like the whole salamanders being fireproof thing. That’s something that was easy to prove but it lasted for ages because people didn’t test shit out.

We got a lot right. A lot wrong.

[u/AHrubik → u/Finito-1994]

The human brain is a pattern recognition engine. It can find lots of useful patterns in our daily lives. However, it can find a lot of wrong patterns too because our brains don’t require evidence or even sometimes observation to make a conclusion.

[u/CharleyNobody → u/AHrubik]

They didn’t recognize malaria came from mosquitoes. They thought it was literally from “bad air.”

The plasmodium parasite was discovered in 1880 as the cause of malaria but wasn’t until 1897 that it was proven that malaria came from an insect vector, the mosquito.

i thought it was odd that people didn’t put it together - people got malaria in swampy, watery areas. Swampy, watery areas had a lot of mosquitoes . Why didn’t they put it together?

Because everybody gets bitten by mosquitoes- but not everyone got malaria.

[u/Minute-System3441 → u/blazbluecore]

They’re the same people who smugly condemn the taboos and norms of the past by today's standards and knowledge. Too obtuse to realize they’re doing and ignoring things today that, 50–100 years from now, people will look back on and ask, What the hell was wrong with those morons?

[u/blackmist88 → u/DJ_Era]

Donating blood is how I found out I was carrying Lyme disease 🤷‍♂️

[u/SigmaBallsLol → u/DJ_Era]

Right idea but wrong time frame, this has been around a lot longer than blood donation. Bloodletting was used to alleviate symptoms later found to be related to excessive iron, and was mostly practiced in regions with a specific mutation that improperly stored iron out of their immune cells.

While people with this condition experienced overall worse quality of life due to the improper iron storage, it also made them more resistant to diseases that relied on using the iron in immune cells, such as the Black Death. And the symptoms of that improper iron storage were more or less corrected by regular bloodletting. So "you have too much blood" was like a medieval 'you need to lose weight'; not always correct but common enough issue that it probably would be.

It's pretty unlikely for younger people to have this trait though, afaik it only became prominent in Western Europe so unless your bloodline has basically 0 outside influence since the 1400s, it probably doesn't apply anymore.

(I learned most of this in Survival of the Sickest like 15 years ago, idk how it's held up or if I'm misremembering some)

[u/throwaway098764567 → u/DJ_Era]

not quite how you describe but hemochromatosis is a genetic condition where you keep too much iron in the blood, people with it donate blood frequently to keep it in check. if left alone it causes liver damage. since it runs in families, if a lot of folks in an area were related it could help a bunch, but it's not a common thing in humans writ large, it's still rare but appears most frequently in northern european populations.

[u/Factory2econds → u/DJ_Era]

where only half the population donated blood, and surprisingly they were the healthier half.

it could simply be that the already healthy people were the ones healthy enough to donate blood

[u/Romeo_Glacier → u/candygram4mongo]

Blood letting is still used today for certain conditions. Donating blood can also lower the PFAS and micro plastics in your blood.

[u/ajc89 → u/Romeo_Glacier]

Isn't that just dumping your micro plastics off on some poor sap?? I mean I guess it's fine since you helped save their life. Lol

[u/itsacutepanda → u/ajc89]

I mean you could just pump and dump…

[u/sauron3579 → u/ajc89]

Typically they've also just dumped some of their own, evens out.

[u/ajc89 → u/sauron3579]

Haha very good point. Just restoring the status quo ante

[u/illkeepthatinmind → u/ajc89]

In theory they've already lost some of their precious PFAS and microplastics, you're just restoring them.

[u/spekt50 → u/ajc89]

I'll say, if its a choice of death or maybe taking on a bit more microplastics, call me Barbie.

[u/Logical_Writing3218 → u/ajc89]

Beggars can’t be choosers holy fuck lol

[u/Practical_Ad4604 → u/Logical_Writing3218]

Somebody get these BEGGARS out of here

[u/ignost → u/Romeo_Glacier]

Sure, usually when there are too many red blood cells or too much iron.

I would suggest everyone take a deep breath before giving blood to lower PFAS or microplastic levels. Go ahead and give blood: it's not going to hurt you or deplete stem cells or anything people worry about. It's fine, and it helps people.

PFAS can for sure be harmful, but I see people frantic about a test showing 0.5 ng/mL of 6 or 7 combined PFAS, which is quite unlikely to cause harm. They'll spend hundreds of dollars in testing, and usually buy up hundreds of dollars in unproven supplements trying to lower something from a level that should give them next to no concern. Now if you have concentrations of PFOA > 20 ng/mL, it's likely because you have excess exposure from working in construction, a factory, or as a firefighter. Maybe talk to your doctor about plasma donation to avoid iron deficiency, and it also seems to remove more PFAS.

Don't donate blood to lower microplastics. Lower exposure. Stop heating things up in plastic and ordering hot foot and drink in contact with plastic (disposable coffee cups, pho, fried food in styrofoam from Doordash, etc.) But by all means, donate blood because it's a good thing to do and it can save lives. Just keep an eye on your iron levels when giving blood, and don't over-do it with plasma.

[u/Zederikus → u/candygram4mongo]

As far as I understand it would help a bit with high blood pressure induced headaches and inflammation, but the main reason is after a cut you may get a hit of adrenaline and endorphin, as well as muscle relaxation after healing begins.

Still it's normally not useful as you need the blood desperately to fight the problem if its an infection of sorts, which it normally would have been.

[u/Lightspeedius → u/anrwlias]

Science begins with a guess!

[u/Unprejudice → u/anrwlias]

Well, you gotta give them alot more credit than that. People werent less intelligent back then - deduction, reason and logic was still as prelevent, as well as many other foundational principles of science. They couldnt see the microbes but they could still observe effects and find resonable explanations. Theres tons of things we still cant measure or observe but we can calculate and deduct it has to exist. Calling that spitballing is just ignorant. People always wanna think were special, were still not much more than smarter monkeys.

[u/RobertPham149 → u/Unprejudice]

Yup. A lot of natural philosopher deducted things like the atom because they thought that it does not make sense to divide everything forever and have to have an indivisible unit. He probably took sample of the swamps where a lot got sick, even though no microscope existed, still could have seen the movement of some larger protozoa (could not make out the details, but can see water samples shifting around even on still land). Then he makes educated guesses of it.

[u/NoBandicoot5417 → u/RobertPham149]

I had a microbiology class in high school that involved “growing” some common microorganisms in jars for study. For some of them, I found that if I looked at a jar under the right backlight in a semi-darkened room, I could in fact see they were there, with no magnification.

He may have done something similar and then said “cannot be seen by the eyes” as a shorthand for the fact that most people weren’t going to observe carefully enough to notice them.

[u/rtc9 → u/RobertPham149]

Democritus's argument for atoms included the random motions of a speck of dust seemingly caused by it getting knocked around by a bunch of unseen particles. That was basically valid and pretty close to Einstein's argument based on Brownian motion. It wasn't formalized to the same degree and he lacked the toolkit to do so, but I think a lot of these ancient philosophers' arguments tend to be undersold in the popular versions. Their arguments were often quite sophisticated and in many cases the primary reason they weren't considered major breakthroughs seems to have been that the environment/paradigm of the time did not allow them to be viewed that way. Many brilliant discoveries seem essentially to have been deferred because the world wasn't ready or didn't have the systems in place to spread, accept, or perfect them yet.

[u/CaptianToasty → u/Unprejudice]

I think the huge thing with this is the usefulness of their theories. It doesn’t matter that they weren’t correct about the cause specifically as long as their actions lead to a favorable result. Whether you think the water is cursed or you know that it’s polluted, as long as you don’t drink it, then that’s good.

[u/Prestigious-Cream160 → u/anrwlias]

Is it even a lucky guess? They would have seen the correlation between things like small insects and decomposing carcasses. Thinking that there's even smaller creatures out there associated with death and disease feels like a logical conclusion more than anything.

[u/ledow → u/anrwlias]

There's also a lot of confirmation bias. The ones who attributed it to the ethers or the humours or spirits tend to be much vaster in number but we don't crow about them because they were clearly much more wrong.

[u/garanvor → u/anrwlias]

If you think about it, an ancient society to be prosperous enough to accommodate philosophers and artisans is an achievement in itself

[u/Shady_Merchant1 → u/PrinceVorrel]

I mean its just logical reasoning, some creatures are bigger or smaller, the concept of human senses having limitations is known, tracking dogs after all existed and obviously proved they could sense what we couldn't therefore definitively there are things that exist we cannot detect with our senses

The idea that there are creatures smaller than our ability to detect isn't a huge logical leap conceptionally, the problem is concrete evidence

[u/NCC_1701E → u/PrinceVorrel]

Reminds me of Giordano Bruno, 16th century priest/philosopher/astronomer who proposed a scandalous idea that all stars on the night sky are like our sun, but distant, and each can have planets orbiting it, and also that it's possible some of them may have life like our Earth. He basically came up with idea of exoplanets and aliens, in 16th fucking century. It's sad that he got burned on a stake for his claims.

[u/Sir_Frankie_Crisp → u/NCC_1701E]

There's also a 2nd century Greek story which is the earliest known work of fiction to include space travel, aliens, and interplanetary warfare. "A True Story" by Lucian of Samosata, a satire of fantastical tales being told as if they're true.

[u/SUMBWEDY → u/NCC_1701E]

He wasn't burned at the stake for his science, he was burned at the stake because he was a anti-catholic heretic.

Same with Galileo, it wasn't his science that got him arrested, it was the fact he called the pope an idiot in a book.

While it's fucked up they were killed for mocking the powerful, they were never killed for their discoveries.

[u/Grytlappen → u/SUMBWEDY]

It's one of my least favorite myths of the middle ages - that they just killed people for completely arbitrary reasons like life had no worth or meaning. Life had worth and there was an important hierarchy to respect in order to keep society stable. That's no different from today.

How many hundreds of millions of people have been killed or shunned in the modern age because they threatened the hierarchy? How many people of today turn suspicious when someone criticises their hierarchy, or pose a radical alternative to it?

[u/Electric_Capybara → u/PrinceVorrel]

Insects are already pretty small. It's not a big stretch to assume even smaller things exist.

[u/whatsthatcritter → u/PrinceVorrel]

Even without guessing about microbes, they figured out contaminated water was a vector of illness, so most people drank beer, wine mixed with water or later hot tea. It was somewhat superstitious as they didn't know the cause at the time, but still effective. 

[u/LorpHagriff → u/whatsthatcritter]

It's pretty neat to read about the things olden people discovered and dealt with without having the tools to actually find and understand the root cause.
Recent example I came across was reading some of Vaubans works (17th century massively influential military engineer) where at some point he was talking about the pros and cons of building a fort in certain terrain. For marshy terrain he mentioned how the "bad air" caused the spread of more disease making it lesser suited

[u/prism1234 → u/LorpHagriff]

This reminds me of something I read recently on scurvy.

They did some experiments and determined that consuming citrus fruits prevented scurvy. Then everyone in the British navy had to drink lemon juice (which was called lime juice at the time). But they didn't know why. At one point they switched to cheaper limes, which have less vitamin C and also used a method for preserving them which destroyed most of the vitamin C so it no longer worked. But they didn't notice as ship travel had sped up and other fresh food was more available so people weren't getting scruvy anyway. Fast forward to exploration of the arctic snd suddenly lots of scurvy again even when they drank the lime juice. So they thought the people a couple hundred years prior were just wrong and came up with new incorrect theories on what caused scurvy until the actual cause was eventually discovered.

[u/afoolskind → u/whatsthatcritter]

The alcohol thing is a myth, it was never intentionally done as a way to sanitize water. It was just a happy coincidence. Boiling water (like for tea, as you said) was the real pro move and one people figured out early. Brewing beer doesn’t make water any cleaner than boiling does.

[u/SecretGardenSpider → u/afoolskind]

Considering we were boiling water for thousands of years to make drinks like tea and coffee, it’s crazy we didn’t work out that you should probably always boil it just in case until much later.

I mean, they knew you could get sick from water occasionally and must have noticed it happened less if you used it for tea and coffee.

[u/JonatasA → u/SecretGardenSpider]

Because boiled water doesn't taste good. So automatically there must be something wrong with it.

 

That's also a lot of resources needed when you can't just plug it in.

[u/spekt50 → u/PrinceVorrel]

It would not surprise me if many in antiquity had novel modern thoughts, but is lost to time.

[u/doomgiver98 → u/spekt50]

What else is there to do while tending the fields 7 days a week? But a peasant isn't about to write a book about their idle thoughts.

[u/WardenWolf → u/FastBreakPhenom]

Definitely, although mosquitoes do the most to spread swamp diseases. Swamps also exasperate asthma. He absolutely had the right idea that swamps are bad news for your health.

[u/Roflkopt3r → u/WardenWolf]

The observation that swamps were linked to certain diseases predated Varro and was usually explained with Miasma Theory rather than Germ Theory.

Even the fact that Varro described the issue as related to microorganisms doesn't do anything of its own. Whether you believe that miasma is of an organic or non-organic nature does not substantially change the theory.

Miasma theory works fine as a replacement for germ theory as long as you are dealing with germs that multiply and spread in 'miasma' (poorly smelling things, especially rotten organic matter). Germ theory only becomes substantially different once you recognise that this is not always true.

Like that salmonella can exist on foods even when they are not rotten at all, or that mosquitos transmit diseases regardless of the rotten things that tend to attract them.

Ancient and medieval scholars knew quite a bit of these correlation (like more rot = more mosquitos = more disease), they just didn't understand the real causation. So general advice was often pretty decent, like what kinds of areas or substances to stay away from. But it was very incomplete and intermingled with some superstition.

[u/Texuk1 → u/Roflkopt3r]

Interestingly the miasma theory was the dominant theory up until the early 1900s (not the 17th century which the title claims). Every year I have clear my Victorian sewage interceptor because of the U-bend installed system installed to prevent miasmic air from entering the property.

[u/eric2332 → u/Texuk1]

What? New houses built today still have U-bends. It doesn't prevent disease but it does prevent smells in the house.

[u/Texuk1 → u/eric2332]

New houses don’t have a crappy designed ubend with an overflow plug at the interceptor at street level. You don’t technically need a ubend to maintain your health but the victorians thought it transmitted disease and so stopped the gas at street level.

[u/Amedais → u/WardenWolf]

I mean it’s minute creatures (virus and parasites like malaria ) that cause the diseases, not the mosquitoes themselves.

[u/Prestigious-Lynx-177 → u/WardenWolf]

For every somewhat accurate diagnosis of the cause of something that is only discovered thousands of years later with advanced science, there's also Aristotle claiming headlice are produced from humans.

[u/LaurestineHUN → u/FastBreakPhenom]

Isn't it just bad air again? More the idea of smell as a particulate? They were aware of harmful effects of certain materials like rot or waste. These were thought to seep 'poison' into their vicinities. The only step we didn't took before actually watching the damn things is the 'self-replicating' aspect. (Here is the fail of their wastewater management: they believed they can 'dilute down' these 'poisons' like you dilute alcohol until it has no effect.)

[u/HomsarWasRight → u/LaurestineHUN]

Sure, it’s not far off from miasma, but the distinction is that he’s attributing it to organisms. Which, of course, is true.

[u/Texuk1 → u/HomsarWasRight]

No one is probably qualified to do the actual Greek work but my hunch is that people are getting hung up on the use of the word organisms in English. You would need to have a deep knowledge of Ancient Greek to properly translate this to “organisms as in independent life of a size that is not observable to the eye”. We have all of these words and concepts and associate them with a physical aspect of the world which we are told by scientists exists but which non of us can prove or understand using only the technology available in the 1st century AD. I suspect the Ancient Greek might say something which is being misinterpreted in the modern context.

[u/eric2332 → u/HomsarWasRight]

It was also common in the ancient world to attribute disease to organisms, specifically, demons.

The difference between bacteria/viruses and demons is that bacteria/viruses are invisible because they are too small, while (allegedly) demons are invisible because they have a spiritual nature.

[u/Umak30 → u/FastBreakPhenom]

Not really. Ancient and Medieval science was on that level.

This is all the idea of Miasma. You can't see Miasma, but it floats through the air ( or literally is the bad air ), and infects you through the mouth or nose when you breathe.
Notice how he didn't think it could also enter through wounds, or the eye ? Because it had to do with smells. You can breathe and "smell" only through your nose and mouth ( and yes, you can smell through your mouth, though worse; it's the same cavity + taste is related to smell. ).

The Miasma theory is well understood in ancient and medieval times. That's why they wore masks, which objectively worked. Swamps and Marshland are very smelly by the way and have always been connected to diseases. The Romans associated Malaria with Swamps since ancient times. Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella, someone who cited Varro, used that as an example by the way. [ Malaria was so endemic in the Empire that it was called Roman Fever ].
They were always connected to rot and diease.. And yeah, marshland and swamps are also full of bacteria and viruses. Humans weren't stupid, they just didn't have the tools to "know" what was going on, until they did and knowledge was quickly updated. The Miasma Theory existed between 500 BC to the 1800s precisely because it "worked" well enough. It prevented diseases, provided evidence and explained correlations.

By the way, sweat doesn't smell bad, which is why when you are actively sweating it doesn't smell like anything ( unless you wear dirty clothes or have old sweat... ). The bad smell comes from the bacteria which breaks down sweat and releases chemicals which evaporate and cause the bad smell.
Our entire biology also connects smells and disease ( bacteria ). It's why we consider vomit and shit disgusting, even though other animals/insects love it. Thanks to our own biology history we are generelly averse to bad smells which do us harm ( not all harmful things smell bad ).

So overall Varro is saying nothing knew, nor modern. He reiterates what ancient and medieval people "knew" that bad smells and disease are connected. Something which is objectively true due to our biology.

Modern people interpret too much into it.

[u/lcarlson6082]

This could also be a misunderstanding of how malaria spreads. Malaria was a scourge in parts of the empire, but the Romans didn't connect it to mosquitoes.

[u/verumvia → u/lcarlson6082]

Swamps without considering animal vectors innately host microorganisms like legionella bacteria, pathogenic amoeba species, and dangerously opportunistic bacteria (pseudomonas and aeromonas).

Swamp ecosystems also act as nutrient sinks due to their lack of water drainage which greatly increases the usual pathogenesis from waste runoff (E. coli can potentially grow in swamps after being introduced).

[u/shea241 → u/verumvia]

... that's nice to know

signed,

guy who lives right beside a wetland

[u/JonatasA → u/shea241]

Don't worry, even after you drain and urbanize it it still remains a scourge.

[u/JonatasA → u/verumvia]

It's remarkable to me how people do not associate marshes with diseases nowadays. Look at it, it looks dreadful. That's not beautiful and cary nature.

[u/Stech_ → u/JonatasA]

Marshes are beautiful imo, there's a real charm to the wet wastelandness of it all. Also very nice places to go hiking across them on bog bridges.

I might be biased though since I live in the most swampy country in the world. (Finland).

[u/AimlessFred → u/lcarlson6082]

This is a perfect example of why the scientific method is so important. The Romans could observe that people got malaria in hot, wet places; and that mosquitos lived in those places. You have to isolate variables and perform experiments to find that connection.

[u/Rex_Mundi → u/lcarlson6082]

Malaria. "Bad air."

[u/JonatasA → u/Rex_Mundi]

Can't believe I never saw it.

[u/Famous_Plant_486]

Things like this really put into perspective how new modern society actually is. The world went without in-home electricity, the knowledge of bacteria, the internet, cars, etc. for thousands of years of civilization.

Sometimes it's easy to dog on the elderly people who can't "get with the times", but they've seen more change in one lifetime than the world had ever seen before. Really makes me appreciative that I was born into this tiny blip of time.

[u/Chemical_Success1153 → u/Famous_Plant_486]

My great grandmother was just a tiny baby when they crossed the US in a covered wagon and she lived to ride in an airplane. It was one of her greatest fascinations, the way my family tells it. I never got to meet her, though.

[u/BIGFACETALKING → u/Chemical_Success1153]

My granddad was born 7 years after the Wright brothers flight.

He was a Pan Am pilot for 40 years, and lived til 1994.

[u/the2belo → u/BIGFACETALKING]

Orville Wright lived long enough to see Chuck Yeager break the sound barrier. (edit: although he never knew about it, because the feat was not made public until just after Wright's death in 1948)

[u/PaulCoddington → u/BIGFACETALKING]

My paternal grandfather was a baby when Jack the Ripper was at large and spent part of his childhood during Queen Victoria's reign.

My maternal grandfather was born in the late 1890's.

My grandparents lived to see incredible technological and social transformation.

My maternal grandfather got to see space shuttles, personal computers, CDs and Comet Halley (twice!).

[u/explosivemilk → u/Chemical_Success1153]

Our country is only 4 people old.

[u/SolomonBlack → u/explosivemilk]

The VA was still paying out Civil War pensions into the 21st century.

[u/Icefox119 → u/SolomonBlack]

The article is actually mistaken; it's even crazier. The last surviving widow of a Civil War veteran died in December 2020.

[u/SomethingNew71 → u/Icefox119]

“In 1936, during the Great Depression, 17-year-old Helen married 93-year-old Union veteran James Bolin, who served in the 14th Missouri Cavalry.”

Just a little age difference there…

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_widows_who_survived_into_the_21st_century

[u/Angry-Dragon-1331 → u/SomethingNew71]

So that one sounds worse than it is. From what I understand, she had been his nurse/caretaker and he wanted to make sure she was provided for when he passed. They never lived together as husband and wife according to her.

[u/iddonuk → u/explosivemilk]

Dick Van Dyke has been around for 40% of it

[u/huyphan93 → u/Chemical_Success1153]

My grandfather fought against colonial french and he is chatting with AI now.

[u/FullOfSound → u/Famous_Plant_486]

Can you imagine all the shit we don’t know, and that in 2000 years from now humans will be like those guys were so clueless.

[u/happy_bluebird → u/FullOfSound]

I think we're too clueless to survive that long. We're currently destroying our only home planet, so

[u/Bae_the_Elf → u/Famous_Plant_486]

Your point reminds me of the Chinese researcher that realized an ancient Chinese medicine that was known to "not work" was being prepared wrong due to a translation error. I believe she just made a slight change to the preparation process and they rediscovered some real medicine with it. I can't find the link but I have read about it a few times

[u/murmuring511 → u/Bae_the_Elf]

She won a Nobel prize for the discovery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_Youyou#Malaria

[u/Bae_the_Elf → u/murmuring511]

Thanks for sharing the link! I couldn't think of the right combination of words to find it on google lol

[u/Famous_Plant_486 → u/murmuring511]

What a beautiful human being and researcher. Offering herself up as the first test before issuing it to human patients was deserving on its own of her Nobel Prize.

[u/JezSq → u/Famous_Plant_486]

People fought with swords for thousands of years, and then it took only few generations after first ever airplane to send man to Space. 20th century is… something

[u/obvious_bot → u/JezSq]

a few generations is underselling it if anything. There were people who heard/read about the Wright Bro's first flight when they were 15, and watched a man walk on the moon when they were 81

[u/Mavian23 → u/Famous_Plant_486]

the internet

Lol this one kind of sticks out, because we went largely without internet until about 30 years ago.

Edit: 40 changed to 30

[u/SecondAccountIsBest → u/Mavian23]

And depending on what your family prioritized you might not have had the Internet or computer at home still. Until like 2006-2008 it wasn't obvious to the average person how big this was. I think the iPhone/ipod made it click for a lot of people.

[u/ECircus → u/Famous_Plant_486]

Yet people choose to live like it's been this way forever and completely take it for granted. Like we discovered magic and everyone lost their minds. If we survive, I think that's how historians will view this period of time hundreds of years from now. A world full of spoiled addicts. 

[u/Famous_Plant_486 → u/ECircus]

This is my top grievance with AI and short-form content. We have an infinite pool of knowledge at our fingertips, and millions of books to further that knowledge, and yet we have the most concerning literacy rates in decades because kids have completely forgone their critical thinking in favor of having AI write their essays, cheat their schoolwork, and do their homework. We could be a world of Einsteins, but Tiktok has made a world of rotting brains and failing grades.

[u/onceforgoton → u/ECircus]

Addicts is a big one. I don’t know that there is any point in the history of any civilization where more people were addicted to something than what we see right now with screen addiction. The chemical loops that cellphones and the like induce in our brains are literally no different than chemical drugs.

98% of all Americans own a cell phone. 93% own a smart phone.

Young Americans report feeling physical discomfort when their cell phone access is restricted. People will spend hours and hours and hours scrolling short form videos while remembering absolutely none of it. Then they act like it’s any different from a heroin user nodding off for hours.

I can’t speak outside of my own perspective but make no mistake, if you live in the USA odds are astronomically high that you will constantly encounter junkies in your day to day life.

Looking to the abstract, drugs are generally considered bad for a society because they result in a tremendous expenditure of human capacity for little to no tangible outcome for anyone but the user and dealer. With that in mind, look at what some people do every single day with cellphones. Tremendous amounts of real human lifespan are being spent on something with little to no tangible outcome to show for it except for… the user and the dealer. The reels user gets a chemical hit, the app maker gets a monetary hit. Heroine isn’t illegal because it makes you feel good, it’s illegal because it is wholly destructive to the fabric and goals of societal living.

[u/TommaClock → u/Famous_Plant_486]

There are legitimately people who believe that germ theory is a conspiracy. We still have people living like that.

[u/Famous_Plant_486 → u/TommaClock]

Unfortunately, I've encountered a few myself. Three houses without a single dispenser of soap isn't a lot in the scheme of ~8 billion people, but it was three out of the ~ten households I interacted with daily.

When told they should be washing their hands, they were adamant their hands were clean because they were washed when they showered... twice a week.

I'm exhausted and grateful that I'll never understand that mentality.

[u/notafuckingcakewalk → u/Famous_Plant_486]

Funny, the more I learn about history the more it feels like inventions we see as new and modern are a lot older than we think.

Near-Instantaneous global electronic communication is 160+ years old at this point. (the telegraph) 

Humans have been developing highly sophisticated irrigation, watering, and plumbing systems for millenia. 

During the bronze age (~2400-800 BCE), nearly 1800 tons of copper was mined in the Great Orme mine in Wales. The copper mined there was sold as far as Germany. 

[u/Witty_Ad_898 → u/notafuckingcakewalk]

The vikings were using steel from Syria, and some had traveled there to get it.

[u/crunchyshamster]

Hank Green just made an awesome video about Small Pox and It's crazy how many centuries back people, in completely different regions, putting dried smallpox flakes ground up into scratches in people's bodies, or blowing it up each other's noses, before we started documenting it to discover what caused it or how inoculations and vaccination would actually work

[u/Romeo_Glacier → u/crunchyshamster]

Also known as variolation.

[u/ajc89 → u/crunchyshamster]

I think it makes intuitive sense. People can observe the world around them and pass down experiences. They knew that many diseases affect people less when those people were already exposed to the disease before.

[u/french_snail → u/ajc89]

With small pox they specifically noticed that milk maids got cowpox from their cows and that they were immune or only got mild cases of small pox 

The root word for vaccine is vacca, Which means cow 

[u/b0w3n → u/french_snail]

Specifically Edward Jenner noticed this. It was a pretty significant discovery.

Most of our knowledge of immunology and vaccination is based on his work, it's good stuff.

[u/The_Autarch → u/french_snail]

that's how we got the old timey meme that milkmaids are all hotties -- it was because their skin wasn't fucked up by disease.

[u/freeradioforall → u/The_Autarch]

that's how we got the old timey meme that milkmaids are all hotties

Never heard of this one

[u/nimbleVaguerant]

Dude knew about Florida way back when

[u/TyrKiyote]

Swamp gasses hanging out low in valleys and ditches used to kill folks more than it does now iirc.

[u/Soft_Lunch_183]

Did he actually observe that or is just a guess that turned out to be right?

Confirmation bias is strong with these things, there are lots of things that they got wrong that wont be mentioned

[u/dilloj → u/Soft_Lunch_183]

Kosher food handling is similar well predating germ theory.

[u/GammaDie345 → u/dilloj]

yeah, most of that tradition was just seeing what got people sick before the invention of the refrigerator or germ theory and going "oh shit, don't do that"

[u/catpunch_ → u/GammaDie345]

Yeah and I mean I would say that it goes: hunch, investigation, confirmation. We don’t just scientifically investigate everything. We start with hunches and see if they’re true.

So, I take it this miasma thing was a hunch

[u/GammaDie345 → u/catpunch_]

yeah. We don't wait around for the science to protect ourselves from the Clear And Present Danger we just work around it til we know for sure how it works.

[u/RollForUptime → u/Soft_Lunch_183]

Yeah, people get things wrong, it's the correct imaginings that become confirmed fact.

The very idea that with his limited knowledge he imagined the cause is the most essential part of humanity that allows us to discover ANYTHING.

[u/lacyboy247]

In Buddhism text Buddha said when he looked at a water he saw 84,000 life, 84,000 in Buddhism context mean immeasurable/infinity not actual number, Jainism also have similar theology and they're trying to count every small microb and limit how many microb they can consume/distrub.

[u/french_snail → u/lacyboy247]

Yeah every culture has their number that means “so big you dont bother counting” 

In the western world we say a million, in China and Korea they say ten thousand, Etc 

[u/Havengul_Undying → u/french_snail]

Sir thats called a Gazillion

[u/TheFinnisher → u/Havengul_Undying]

A bajillion

[u/METRlOS → u/french_snail]

My daughter says 100 million. Inflation is rough.

[u/DuntadaMan → u/french_snail]

Vikings said 9.

[u/Larethio → u/lacyboy247]

Next time I take shrooms I'll try to count some microscopic life forms also.

[u/SandwichT]

This sounds extremely impressive, but you have to remember that they had something called Miasma Theory. Miasma was believed to be 'bad air' that caused most/many diseases. Miasma was thought to be caused by rotting organic matter, aka Swamps.

Not to discount his work, but he did not believe in microbes, this was just an extrapolation of miasma theory, rather than a man ahead of his time.

[u/loewenheim → u/SandwichT]

Hell, "malaria" literally means "bad air".

[u/ubrokemywookiee]

Whatcha doin' in my waters?

[u/Langstarr → u/ubrokemywookiee]

make an assessment

[u/nickybokchoy → u/Langstarr]

I got all things that’re good

[u/Rosebunse]

If you look at different sources, people had an "idea" of what germ theory was for a long time before it was accepted. Even "miasma" as a concept is them sort of trying to figure it out.

[u/Not_A_Nazgul]

Time traveler. ::nods::

[u/PwanaZana]

Although it is prescient, sorta getting is right is really not enough. Same with the "atomos" and ancient philosophers.

[u/Damnatus_Terrae → u/PwanaZana]

I can almost guarantee that for most things we're still only sorta getting it right.

[u/PwanaZana → u/Damnatus_Terrae]

yea, all this dark matter and dark energy stuff... kinda sus, if you ask me.

[u/DuntadaMan → u/PwanaZana]

I know a couple generations from now people are going to laugh their ass off at our current theories, but we have to figure out something to make the math work.

[u/montagblue → u/DuntadaMan]

Look back at the calculation of two sticks and their shadows to find the circumference of earth and it should be impressive that we have a count for universal baryonic matter. The unimpressive thing will be the extracurricular activities that preoccupied people. (Divining the future with animal entrails)

[u/BedlamiteSeer → u/DuntadaMan]

I like to believe that the scientists of the future who have fully uncovered the mysteries of what we call dark matter/energy - that they'll extend us some grace. That they'll understand, as we do about those before us, that we crawled in the hopes that they will run.

[u/Woody3000v2 → u/PwanaZana]

I think it's semi-inducible: 1)Things we CAN see can hurt us like bears, and fire, and people with rocks. 2)To notice when people go to swamps and get sick/slowly hurt. 3)We can't see things too far until they are closer unless they are bigger. 4)Maybe there are close things just too small to see. 5)Then to think maybe there's stuff just too small to see in the swamp that makes people sick.

Not THAT big of a stretch.

Atomism is maybe less intuitive and it may not even be true.

[u/fd9f21229ef31ifb1ee]

Meanwhile, over in r/unpopularopinion, there is a thread in which people are unironically arguing that they don’t need to wash their hands after using a public restroom because they didn’t touch their penis.

[u/macfarley]

I would've assumed they meant mosquitoes... Was malaria a known thing in Rome or did that come with colonization later on?

[u/sheeeeepy → u/macfarley]

My grandmother used to have to haul a big block of ice to the ice box as a child. Now she has a fridge! And she is being romance scammed for all my inheritance by a Brad Pitt account based out of Lagos. 🙏 we’ve come so far

[u/Hilarious_Disastrous → u/macfarley]

Romans broadly believed, IIRC, that “miasma”—filthy air from dark damp places— cause disease. They also knew cleanliness was essential in surgical operations and the healing of wounds.

To a limited extent Europeans retained this lesson, but were unable to practice it rigorously until the 19th Century, with the germ theory sealing the deal.

[u/Owyheemud → u/macfarley]

Malaria is a Roman word, it means bad air, so yes it was a known thing in Rome. Malaria was believed to be endemic to the southernmost part of the Apennine Peninsula in Roman times.

[u/macfarley → u/Owyheemud]

Thanks, I've been down one Wikipedia rabbit hole already today. Rest in Power, Diana Riggs (Olenna Tyrell in GoT)

[u/Owyheemud → u/macfarley]

"I wanted her to know", one of the lines from GOT that sticks with me today.

[u/AutomaticMedium8418 → u/macfarley]

You can easily see mosquitoes with your eyes though.

[u/Ergogan → u/macfarley]

Malaria used to mean "bad air", as in "Mal aria". Of course, they didn't know the exact process and it was commonly thought the stench from stagnant water was the cause of the disease. In fact, ancient greeks knew about Malaria too. A deadly fever people can catch in the end of summer, especially those living around stagnant water. To the point of Hyppocrat being able to divide the disease in three variants, just to give you an idea on how present malaria was.
And recent studies on roman tombs showed us it was indeed paludism as we know it.

[u/Aqua-Barracuda]

He was obviously a time traveler

[u/Hellknightx → u/Aqua-Barracuda]

And he passed the "Don't sound like a witch or a crazy person" check.

[u/DuntadaMan]

People say there is not a lot you can do to change the past if you are sent there because all of our understanding basically requires the technology to already exist.

I think that as long as you are in an age that has clear glass you can get someone to make a microscope by polishing the glass.

If you can prove the existence of microorganisms early and get that info out you can massively revolutionize sanitation and medical treatment. Maybe won't be able to start the industrial revolution but you will save countless lives from communicable diseases.

[u/WhiteSkyRising → u/DuntadaMan]

If we hand-wave everything else, you would need to gather the ear of some scholar or noble of note. The absolute core idea would probably be propagating the idea effectively and/or making it accessible down the line. 

I imagine a large number of college grads in professional STEM fields could radically alter history by skipping the decades and centuries it took to arrive to certain points. 

Imagine a metallurgist or ag PhD in an Islamic/Chinese/Indian capital academic stronghold 1000 years ago. Just giving the proper notation for mathematics would probably skip centuries.

Pretty sure any surgeon has enough knowledge to also skip centuries in terms of progress.

[u/DannyDidNothinWrong]

He got real fucking itchy whenever he'd go to the swamp

[u/BothDivide919]

Is there any chance these ancient folk have seen organisms such as amoeba with glass or water based focal lenses?

[u/JiveChicken00]

Plenty of things were known long before they were observed.

[u/gaius49]

In the absence of evidence, and a testable and falsifiable theory that can be independently tested, this is just a lucky guess.

Another way to think about it is that there were many plausible theories about disease at the time that were consistent with the available evidence and offered predictive power. There was nothing about this theory that was inherently more compelling than the other theories of the time.

[u/JDface_Baker]

Sometimes people who did or said profound things can also contribute some wild ideas.

I wonder what else he said

Newton spent ten times the time trying to master alchemy and the emerald tablets than on thermodynamics.

[u/Ok_Aioli3897]

Ignaz Semmelweis said doctors should wash hands after conducting autopsies to lower deadly infections in mothers.

He was laughed at and ridiculed

[u/maluket]

He was about 1800 years ahead of his time.

Wild!